Positioning methods for future location-based services

In this paper we give an overview of the existing and upcoming positioning methods in the mobile environment. With the advent of mobile technologies, increased usage and expansion of mobile devices, mobile services and applications, among them also the so called location-based services, are gaining an increased amount of attention. The user context is an important element of personalization of future information retrieval systems, applications and services. We briefly present our scheme that could be deployed to obtain the user profile and context. An important factor for determination of the latter is an accurate positioning of a user in the environment which can be done by using different methods. Therefore, we have prepared a survey of the existing and upcoming possibilities. We present the state-of-the-art positioning methods and general ideas behind them, however comparisons among them are hard to make. It seems a method that will work well both in the indoor and in the outdoor environments does not exist. Positioning in the indoor areas is due to the nature of the environment namely harder to obtain and the needed precision is higher. Therefore, a combination of methods will be needed for accurate positioning for the future services and applications.